“This stream is only two weeks old. It didn’t exist until two weeks ago,” said environmental engineer Greg Jennings on a recent tour of Pleasant Grove, a restoration project beside the French Broad River in Etowah.
Where there used to be an abandoned golf course, there is a now a new stream, new wetlands, a new backwater slough and a new channel for Little Willow Creek. Or rather, this project is bringing back the kinds of features that existed there before, a century or more ago. This land would have been a natural floodplain where the river could spread out and low areas would fill with water.
A natural floodplain like this offers prime habitat for animals like ducks, turtles, fish, salamanders, frogs, toads, dragonflies, songbirds, otters, bats and more, but, over time, all along the French Broad, landowners built ditches to drain the land. For example, near Pleasant Grove, someone took a stream flowing out of the mountains and diverted it into a roadside ditch.
As part of the restoration, Jennings and his team brought that small stream back, which is why Jennings said it was only two weeks old. The restoration crew made a new streambed for the water - now a clear, rippling stream
At the same time as landowners were digging ditches to get water off the land, they were also building berms to keep water in the river. Walled in, the river became more like a ditch itself - draining water away instead of overflowing and filling the land with life.
Repeat that process many times and what you get is a channelized river where water has nowhere to go when it storms. Huge volumes of stormwater rush down the channel and when the river does overtop its banks, the floods are devastating. At the same time, we’ve lost essential habitat for wildlife. And the river is more polluted, because we don’t have natural areas to filter runoff before it flows into the French Broad.
But now, at an increasing number of places along the river, that process is taking place in reverse. Pleasant Grove was one of three restorations led by Conserving Carolina this spring and summer, and it was also the largest at 70 acres. Conserving Carolina bought the property in 2017, as part of the failed Seven Falls development, where new homes would have been built around the golf course.
Instead, Pleasant Grove will be a place where people can take a walk as trees grow back along the river, birds flourish in new wetlands, and wildflower meadows blossom. The Pleasant Grove restoration includes:
Pleasant Grove will also have about two miles of trails that will be open to the public, once plants grow in and the restoration is ready for visitors. Funding for the Pleasant Grove restoration came from the NC Land and Water Fund, NC Department of Public Safety and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The project was led by Conserving Carolina, designed and overseen by Jennings Environmental and carried out by North State Environmental with vegetation planting by Stone and Spade.
David Lee, Conserving Carolina’s Natural Resources Manager, says that momentum has grown by leaps and bounds since the nonprofit did its first floodplain restoration at Mud Creek, in 2020. Three new restorations were completed this year. In 2021, a study identified 30 landowners along the Upper French Broad River who expressed interest in restoration.
“Clearly, we’re not going to restore natural floodplains along the whole river. It’s not practical," Lee said. "We need agriculture. We all need to eat. But there are places like Mud Creek and Pleasant Grove that can deliver huge bang for the buck. And smaller improvements at lots of properties can result in a much more vibrant river corridor.”
Mud Creek showed what was possible, Lee said.
“A natural floodplain restoration had not been done in the mountains before Mud Creek. There had never been a slough created or large-scale breaking of berms. We went into that project with the goal of true ecological restoration, of restoring habitat for native plants and animals," he said. "And we’ve had discoveries - like, just recently, the spiny softshell turtle, which is rare. Those finds were beyond our expectations but not outside what we were hoping for. We’re seeing true ecological restoration, with the French Broad River connected to its floodplain.”
Rose Jenkins Lane is the communications and marketing director for Conserving Carolina